There is a way for Canadian politicians to walk the line between the struggle against violent Islamism on one hand, and dangerous bigotry on the other; and that is to declare war on extremism yet uphold the rights of minorities, in this context Muslims, with matching ferocity. It really is that simple. How odd that, 13-plus years after 9/11, this lexicon seems still somehow out of reach.

It would be difficult to overstate the depth of revulsion the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham elicits from the average householder in, say, Orillia, Ont., or Longueuil, Que. This is why recent polls show Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government enjoying a bounce in support, particularly in Quebec, as the Conservatives efficiently make this issue their own. In the war against ISIS, into which Canada has sent transport and surveillance aircraft, six F-18 fighter jets, and precisely 69 special forces soldiers, the Tories appear to have found a sweet spot of appearing combative while committing and risking little, certainly relative to the outlay of the Afghan mission.

Bill C-51, the new anti-terrorism law that last week passed second reading, seems of a piece with this strategy. Aside from the measures aimed at easing communication between federal agencies, and freeing the hands of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which are important changes, the law seems as much political goad as legislative document. The obvious explanation for C-51’s lack of robust new oversight, in keeping with the security agencies’ robust proposed new powers, is politics. Each time an intellectual bleats about the perils of unfettered spies or intrusions on civil liberties, the Tories look like brass-knuckled defenders of public safety. They’re betting the populace, whose interest in the detail of legislation is cursory at best, won’t get much beyond their loathing for violent Islamism and the visceral feeling that it must be confronted and wiped out.

Thomas Mulcair’s New Democrats, it is interesting to note, have been handily corralled by this discussion of terrorism, alongside a troubling upswing in hostility towards Islam in Quebec. They could not, realistically, have done anything other than oppose C-51, without turning their backs on their party’s progressive tradition. Relatedly, Mr. Mulcair had little choice last week but to speak out against Quebec judge Eliana Marengo’s astonishing, retrograde refusal to allow Montreal resident Rania El-Alloul to wear the hijab, the Muslim headscarf, in her courtroom. Mr. Mulcair’s statement was admirably clear: It’s a matter of upholding Ms. El-Alloul’s rights as a Canadian. But all this will come at a political cost to the NDP, because it flies in the face of Quebec’s populist, secularist backlash.

The Liberals are in a relatively better position than the NDP because they’re less reliant on Quebec electorally and can, in keeping with their long tradition, cut both ways. The Grit strategy of voting for C-51, noses firmly pinched, blunting charges they’re “soft on terror,” while promising to add additional oversight if elected this fall, is elegant, if one considers the suburban voter at whom it is aimed. In upholding the right to wear the Niqab, the full Muslim veil, in citizenship ceremonies, the Liberals have likewise found a promising “fork” — a way to bolster their progressive cred, while the stance on C-51 presumably mollifies conservatives who just want to see ISIS and its fellow travellers stopped and destroyed.

But the problem faced by the opposition — particularly the Liberals, because they’re the ones polls show are vying to form government — is this: All nuances could easily be subsumed by further ISIS depravity and, God forbid, additional lone-wolf terrorist attacks in Canada or elsewhere. The Liberals have the language of protecting minority rights nailed, which is to their credit. What Liberal leader Justin Trudeau most lacks in this fight, politically, is blunt and passionate rhetoric hammering radical Islamism. For a model he need look no further than his colleague, human rights advocate and former justice minister Irwin Cotler, who has long occupied his party’s principled right flank on this issue.

All of it would weigh in Stephen Harper’s favour, on balance, except for this: The Conservative party’s 2011 majority was built on support from new Canadians. Mr. Harper noted this himself last September in a televised conversation with the editor of the Wall Street Journal. In making a point of taking issue with Muslim religious dress in citizenship ceremonies, as both the PM and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander have recently done, the Conservatives are flirting dangerously with stoking xenophobia.

They should be doing exactly the opposite, for reasons political as much as moral. Mr. Harper himself, not just his spokesman, should uphold the right of Muslim women to wear the headscarf, in court and out of court, wherever and whenever they wish, as a fundamental tenet of Canadian individual liberty. Because Conservatives cannot win the Toronto hinterland if they allow themselves to be perceived as unfriendly to immigrants. Jason Kenney, the government’s multiculturalism point man, gets this. It’s time he had a frank chat with his boss, if he hasn’t already.

Then it’s settled. There will be five televised leaders’ debates in the coming election campaign. Or there will be two. Unless there are three. The Green Party will be included. Or it won’t. As for the Bloc Quebecois, as a spokesman told the Huffington Post, “the Bloc Québécois must participate in the debate. For us, that is not debatable.”

One thing for certain: it will all be decided by “the consortium.” How many debates does Justin Trudeau think there should be? According to the Toronto Star, the Liberal leader “is open to whatever proposals are pitched by the consortium.” Who should be in? “I look forward to having discussions about that with the consortium.” What about Tom Mulcair? What does the leader of the Offical Opposition think about all this? “That is something that is completely left up to the consortium, and I will follow whatever they decide.”

Excuse us for asking, but is this any way to run a democracy?

Televised election debates have been a central part of Canadian election campaigns for the better part of 50 years. Think of Brian Mulroney lecturing John Turner (“you had an option, sir, you could have said No”) in 1984, or Jack Layton’s smackdown of Michael Ignatieff (“most Canadians, if they don’t show up for work, they don’t get a promotion”) in 2011.

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Yet we persist in treating them as if they had just been invented, throwing them together at the last minute and leaving their organization to ad hoc negotiations amongst the three main parties and that shadowy “consortium” — the television networks who stage these events. The results have for the most part been vastly disappointing: if the quips we mentioned stand out, it is only because the rest of what was said has been so forgettable. Or at least, we are doing our best to try.

Typically the debates in any campaign are restricted to one in each language. Knowing they have just one chance to make an impression, the leaders tend to be both over-scripted and over-caffeinated — not least because of the media’s habit of scoring the whole thing like a prize fight. Segregating the events by language, moreover, frees the leaders of the obligation to make their case to the whole country at the same time. The French debate, in particular, is routinely the occasion for all of the leaders to pander to Quebec.

So the debates, so full of potential to illuminate the voting public on the character of the party leaders and the content of their programs, have instead mostly had the opposite effect. It is absurd to be deciding democratic elections on the basis of who “won” or “lost” an all-party shouting match.

That’s never going to change so long as we leave the terms of the debates to such monumentally vested interests to decide. It’s intriguing to hear, for example, that the Conservatives are pushing to have as many as five debates this time out. But this is dictated strictly by their interest, as they see it, in matching the battle-hardened Prime Minister against the rookie Liberal leader — which may also explain Mr. Trudeau’s reluctance to endorse the idea. Were the situations reversed, so would be their respective positions. Quite why either leader should have any say in whether Green Party leader Elizabeth May should be allowed to join them escapes us altogether.

It is long past time the debates were taken away from the networks and the parties, and entrusted to an independent body

As for us, we’d favour an election campaign with at least five debates: one a week for preference, in both official languages (alternating, that is, between English and French, perhaps every half hour). More debates would offer more opportunity to scrutinize the leaders; allow the leaders to go into greater depth on each subject; even provide the chance to experiment with different formats. Best of all, it would calm everyone down. A bad performance one debate could be recouped the next, while the media, deprived of the longed-for “knockout blows,” might be forced to delve into the substance of what was said.

We’d also favour Ms May’s participation, as we would any party leader with a) seats in the House and b) candidates in every riding. Others, of course, might favour a different rule. The point is, it should be a rule, set well in advance, not the hasty result of a self-interested cabal.

It is long past time the debates were taken away from the networks and the parties, and entrusted to an independent body — Elections Canada springs to mind — their broad parameters set out in law, much as the rules governing party fund-raising, campaign advertising and the like are. Let’s have a campaign organized around the debates, by all means. But make this the last one in which the debates are organized around the campaigns.

National Post

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/02/26/national-post-view-bring-on-the-debates-the-more-the-better/feed/2stdJustin Trudeau in question period in the House of Commons Wednesday.Chris Selley: NDP and Liberal positions on niqab during citizenship oath are pleasantly surprisinghttp://news.nationalpost.com/2015/02/26/chris-selley-ndp-and-liberal-positions-on-niqab-during-citizenship-oath-are-pleasantly-surprising/
http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/02/26/chris-selley-ndp-and-liberal-positions-on-niqab-during-citizenship-oath-are-pleasantly-surprising/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 21:47:55 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=707821

On Wednesday, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair threw his support behind the right, which the Federal Court recently upheld, to take the oath of Canadian citizenship while wearing a niqab. “For years I’ve seen that Muslims are often scapegoats in political debates,” he told reporters on Parliament Hill. “And I find that upsetting.”

“The government’s appealing [the ruling], but as far as we’re concerned, the Federal Court got it right,” he said.

Liberal leader Justin Trudeau was out ahead of Mr. Mulcair last week. “Any time a government or a leader is in a position to choose to limit minority rights of any type, there has to be … a clear and compelling reason to do so,” he told Canadian Press. Stephen Harper’s stated reasons for the appeal weren’t nearly good enough, he said. (A spokesman confirms Mr. Trudeau supports the ruling itself.)

It’s difficult to overstate how pleasantly surprising this is. Canadian politicians abhor risk above most everything else. And the cultural-protectionist blowback, especially in Quebec — where Islamophobia is entirely mainstream politics, where both Mr. Harper and the Bloc Québécois are on a roll in the polls, and where both Mr. Mulcair and Mr. Trudeau need to win a whack of seats — could be considerable.

What’s more, their positions violate quite recent precedent. In 2007, amidst Quebec’s initial furor over “reasonable accommodations,” MPs passed Elections Act amendments that they believed banned voting while veiled, but that plainly did not. When Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand informed MPs of this, and refused to enforce a non-existent law, he caught holy hell from all sides. Liberal leader Stéphane Dion asked Elections Canada “to reconsider its decision, and to require veiled women to unveil their faces to confirm their identities.” NDP leader Jack Layton complained that since Mr. Mayrand wouldn’t freelance a ban on veiled voting, “it appears it will be necessary to change the law to make it clear.” (They never did change it, for the record.)

Today’s identity politics in Quebec make 2007’s look like (ahem) a tea party. Forget reasonable accommodations — just trying to open a mosque nowadays is likely to earn you a smackdown from politicians. Moreover, the stakes are certainly higher for Mr. Mulcair than they were for Mr. Layton, and they are arguably higher for Mr. Trudeau, having raised expectations so high, than they were for Mr. Dion. The Bloc, as you would expect, is foursquare against veiled oathing: Responding to Mr. Mulcair’s stance, leader Mario Beaulieu branded him a “multiculturalism fundamentalist.”

So, no question, it would have been easier for Mr. Trudeau or Mr. Mulcair to waffle. The fact that they didn’t is good news not because there’s anything to like about people taking citizenship oaths with sacks over their heads. It is not unreasonable to be offended by the sight of a niqab, whether one imagines it’s worn freely or under duress; and it’s not unreasonable to find it particularly “offensive that someone would hide their identity at the very moment where they are committing to join the Canadian family,” as Mr. Harper put it.

It’s good news because it does seem unreasonable, as the Federal Court found, to go after veiled oaths when citizenship judges’ marching orders stipulate they should allow “the greatest possible freedom in the religious solemnization or the solemn affirmation [of the oath].” It does seem unreasonable for Mr. Harper to suggest allowing people to wear niqabs is “not how we do things here” when, like it or not, it plainly is. It does seem unreasonable to spend goodness knows how much appealing the Federal Court ruling on what seem to be highly dubious legal grounds. And it’s certainly unreasonable in a country that has enshrined religious freedom in the constitution — indeed, it’s grotesque — for the Conservatives to fundraise on the backs of someone wishing to exercise a religious freedom that the courts have thus far upheld. It’s one thing to support unveiled oaths; it’s quite another to endorse this approach to the issue.

No doubt fighting the good fight is reward enough for Mr. Mulcair and Mr. Trudeau. But the risk they’re running may not be as acute as it seems. With their seemingly popular niqabs-and-anti-terror package, Conservatives are essentially fronting a watered-down version of the Parti Québécois’ “values” campaign with a war bolted on. The values charter was popular in the polls, and so was the PQ. And when it came time for Quebecers to vote, it was no help to the PQ at all — not, it seems, because anyone changed their minds about Islam, but because their identitarian angst simply didn’t rank as a priority. Considering how unpopular the Conservatives are in Quebec on just about every other issue, that has to be an encouraging precedent for the opposition.

A former Liberal leadership candidate who is also the mother of Justin Trudeau’s half-sister has defected to the Green Party, saying it best represents those “disillusioned with the established parties.”

Green Party leader Elizabeth May announced Thursday that Deborah Coyne, a constitutional lawyer, will serve as one of her senior policy advisers. In an interview, Coyne said she and May have been friends for a long time, and that the two have been talking about working together for a while.

“My expertise in thinking is all about how do we build a better Canada, and how do we find the policies that work and repair democracy,” Coyne said. “And Elizabeth May is an inspiring leader, and she is gaining in credibility every day.”

Before her move to the Greens, Coyne had a long history with the Liberals. She worked for a time in then-prime minister John Turner’s office, finished second to NDP leader Jack Layton in Toronto-Danforth in the 2006 election, and ran for the federal Liberal leadership that was ultimately won by Trudeau in April 2013.

This past November, Coyne lost her bid to carry the Liberal flag in Ottawa West-Nepean in this year’s federal election. International human rights expert Anita Vandenbeld will run for the party instead in that riding.

Coyne, who dated Pierre Trudeau for several years and is the mother of his only daughter, Sarah Elisabeth Coyne, shrugged off suggestions that her switch to the Greens was a result of having lost the Liberal nomination in Ottawa West-Nepean. She also wouldn’t say if she will run for the Greens in the next election.

“It’s not something I’ve thought about,” she said.

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Coyne said she was not worried about paying off $40,000 in accumulated debt still left from her Liberal leadership bid two years ago, in which she placed fifth out of six candidates on the ballot. She also wouldn’t talk about Justin Trudeau’s leadership style, and whether it contributed to her decision to switch parties.

“We are in a crisis right now, and (May) articulates it so well,” she said. “A democratic crisis. A crisis in which Canadians do not see policy being developed with the long term in mind, but just because of short-term partisan issues. And this is a logical step for me to apply my skills in this area.”

Liberal spokesman Olivier Duchesneau said the party would not comment on Coyne’s move.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/02/26/former-trudeau-rival-deborah-coyne-leaves-the-red-tent-for-a-green-party-post/feed/1stdUnsuccessful leadership candidates Deborah Coyne, who is shown during the 2013 Liberal Leadership National Showcase, Karen McCrimmon and David Bertschi are all seeking Liberal nominations in the city and are all carrying steep debts left over from their run against Justin Trudeau for the party’s top jobJustin Trudeau supports doctor-assisted death ruling because of his experience with his fatherhttp://news.nationalpost.com/2015/02/24/justin-trudeau-supports-doctor-assisted-death-ruling-because-of-his-experience-with-his-father/
http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/02/24/justin-trudeau-supports-doctor-assisted-death-ruling-because-of-his-experience-with-his-father/#commentsTue, 24 Feb 2015 17:15:08 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=705747

Justin Trudeau says he personally believes the Supreme Court of Canada was right to strike down the ban on doctor-assisted death.

The Liberal leader says his own view is based on his experience when his father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, was dying.

Trudeau has in the past confirmed that his father, who had also been diagnosed with early stage dementia, chose not to receive treatment for advanced prostate cancer.

Trudeau says he’s well aware not everyone shares his view on assisted dying and parliamentarians have a duty to hear from all sides as they attempt to craft a new law.

The court has given Parliament 12 months in which to draft a law that recognizes the right of clearly consenting adults who are enduring intolerable physical or mental suffering to seek medical help to end their lives.

Trudeau has moved a House of Commons motion calling for creation of a multi-party committee to consult Canadians and experts and to draft the outlines of a new law by the end of July, although the Conservatives say they’ll vote against it because they intend to launch their own consultations soon.

Ottawa lawyer David Bertschi has launched legal action against three top advisers to Liberal leader Justin Trudeau after his approval to seek the party’s nomination as a federal candidate was revoked.

Bertschi filed a claim against Liberal campaign co-chairs Katie Telford and Dan Gagnier and the party’s national director, Jeremy Broadhurst, alleging they defamed him over a contentious nomination fight in the riding of Ottawa-Orléans.

Bertschi had sought the nomination as Liberal candidate in the riding and was initially approved by the party’s “green light” committee.

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But Telford and Gagnier later rescinded their approval, citing unpaid debts that lingered from his long-shot bid for the Liberal leadership and another defamation action involving a U.S. gossip website, which they claimed he hadn’t disclosed.

With Bertschi knocked out of the race, Trudeau adviser and former Canadian Forces general Andrew Leslie was acclaimed as the candidate.

Bertschi last year filed a libel notice – the first volley in a defamation case – and followed through earlier this month by filing a notice of action and claim against the three Liberals, preserving his right to file a full statement of claim.

He has yet to serve the notice on the defendants.

In the court document, Bertschi claims “defamatory statements and libelous publications made by the Defendants with respect to the Plaintiff’s candidacy in the Liberal Party of Canada’s nomination contest in the electoral riding of Orleans for the upcoming 2015 federal election.”

He does not describe the statements he alleges are defamatory and instead says they were set out in the libel notice he sent in November, which has never been made public. That notice referred to a letter sent by Telford and Gagnier to a limited number of people within the party.

Because of this alleged defamation, Bertschi claims he suffered “diminution of his personal, professional and political reputations.”

None of the allegations in his claim has been proven in court.

Neither Bertschi nor his lawyer, Charles Gibson, could be reached for comment. Broadhurst declined to comment.

When he was disqualified, Bertschi said that he was well on his way to paying off his $50,000 leadership campaign debts and explained that he hadn’t mentioned a libel action against TheDirty.com because it had been abandoned before he filed his candidacy papers.

The Orleans nomination fight is not the first to end up in a defamation lawsuit. Toronto Liberal hopeful Christine Innes and her husband, former Liberal MP Tony Ianno, sued Trudeau and Ontario campaign co-chair David MacNaughton over a letter accusing her campaign of strong-arm tactics and blocking her candidacy.

Trudeau’s aides faced allegations that they had blocked Innes to protect their preferred candidate, MP Chrystia Freeland, from a nomination fight in a newly formed Toronto riding.

The debate, for want of a better word, over the Anti-Terrorism Act is a perfect microcosm of Canadian politics in 2015. All of the strengths and weaknesses of the various parties are on glorious display, as are the institutional shortcomings that lend our democracy its distinct charm and character.

Occasionally you will hear appeals to keep politics out of it, on the grounds that national security is too important to be made into a “wedge issue.” This is a code phrase the media generally reserves for “successful Conservative issue,” and while the Conservatives have undoubtedly been wedging as fast as they can, the same is true for all of the parties. They just each do it in their own way.

For the Conservatives it manifests itself as a determination to be just as crude, simplistic and bullheaded as their worst critics would have it. The Harper Tories are the Soviet boxers of Canadian politics, a technicolour stereotype of plodding brutality. Another leader, introducing a bill that would authorize security forces, inter alia, to arrest people without charge and to break the law without penalty, would go out of his way to reassure his audience that he took their civil liberties concerns seriously. He’d express his respect for critics, invite scrutiny, applaud debate, even if he didn’t mean a word of it.

But Mr. Harper’s style is not to co-opt or disarm opposition, but to run straight over it. Introducing the legislation, as is now the norm, not in Parliament, but at a campaign rally — let us dispense with the usual “campaign-style” cliche: the campaign is on — the prime minister gave not one grudging, graceless inch to the bill’s critics. “Every time that we talk about security,” he complained, “[the opposition] suggest that somehow our freedoms are threatened.” The police are “on our side,” he said. “It’s the jihadists who are against us.” The jihadists and, well, you do the math.

The government has since signalled its intention to cut off debate on the bill at second reading (a motion was expected Monday night) after just three days of debate, though not before indicating its unwillingness to accept any amendments in committee. Even on the issue of improved oversight — a motherhood issue, one would have thought, that touches on none of the bill’s most significant and controversial measures — they are simply not going to give anyone the satisfaction. After all, why spoil their perfect record?

The opposition parties, meanwhile, have been in various stages of disarray since the bill’s (you should pardon the expression) unveiling, acutely conscious of its massive popularity among the public, 82% of whom told a pollster they approved of it — though probably not more than 1% could tell you the first thing about what was in it.

Their first instinct was to hide. For days and weeks you could not find an opposition member to say boo about the bill. Eventually the Liberals emerged to say that they would vote for it now, but amend it later — that is, after they had been elected. The NDP at length screwed up the nerve to say they would actually vote against the bill — though Tom Mulcair later allowed, in an interview with Global News, that if his party were in power, they, too, would amend the bill, not repeal it.

Substantively, there isn’t a lot of difference between the two positions. Since neither party has the ability to defeat the bill, it doesn’t much matter who does or does not vote against it. Nor has either party any real prospect of amending the bill, given the government’s stance, unless and until they form a government, though both have promised they would amend it in that event, probably on broadly similar lines.

Still, all this dancing about told you plenty about each party’s strategy for the coming election. For the Liberals, the accent is on how little, in policy terms, would change if they were to replace the Tories in power — since the voters they need to reach are those who are not greatly put out by the Tories’ policies, but fed up with their toxic approach to politics. They have been making that point for some time with regard to the economy. With the focus shifting to fighting terrorism — not the government’s doing, but the times — the same is being wrung out of them on security.

The NDP, oddly, has much the same message: were the Liberals to be elected, nothing much would change. Only it’s aimed at a different group of voters — not the centre-right voters the Liberals hope to lure away from the Tories, but the centre-left voters the NDP hopes to lure away from the Liberals. What’s the use in changing governments, they are telling those voters, if nothing else changes? Only the NDP represents real change, they will say, and the Liberals’ willingness to vote in favour of this bill is proof of it.

Why, it’s almost as if the NDP were trying to pry those voters away from the Liberals, as if they were driving a — what’s the word, again? — between them. Oh yes: a wedge.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/02/23/andrew-coyne-debate-over-anti-terrorism-bill-a-perfect-microcosm-of-canadian-politics/feed/3stdLeadersRex Murphy: Trudeau does a fine vague verbal dance on many things. This is not reassuringhttp://news.nationalpost.com/2015/02/20/rex-murphy-trudeau-does-a-fine-vague-verbal-dance-on-many-things-this-is-not-reassuring/
http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/02/20/rex-murphy-trudeau-does-a-fine-vague-verbal-dance-on-many-things-this-is-not-reassuring/#commentsFri, 20 Feb 2015 19:45:50 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=703228

The Liberal party under Mr. Trudeau’s stewardship has had a relatively smooth ascension. He did political CPR on a nearly dying party, and has so greatly revived it since that it can plausibly be seen as forming a government in the coming election. And yet a number of backtracks, contradictions and a pattern of evasiveness or equivocation on big issues suggest the path forward will not be so clear.

The once much-trumpeted open nominations policy has twisted itself into a number of squabbles and mini-rebellions. Open nominations was early on announced with such zest and idealism by Mr. Trudeau, to offer a glowing contrast, both in process and tone, to the Liberals’ idea of how Mr. Harper handles like matters. The suggested image: Harper — mean-spirited controlling ogre. Trudeau — welcome, all welcome. Come as you are!

Well, on the open nominations the pledge was little more than a tissue in a high wind. It blows where it listeth. There have been orders to stand down, clearance for the favoured of the inner circle, and even litigation from some blocked and disappointment nominees. It appears that in the Liberal party, if I may twist a phrase, some nominations are more open than others.

Candidates who have Mr. Trudeau’s favour, those marked out with presumed status or favoured by the inner band of advisers, get a head start. Others are banned and barred. All this received a deeply ironic underscore when Eve Adams, a Conservative for some two decades who had been denied the chance to run for her nomination due to alleged misconduct, showed up one morning recently, bright as a button, to sit beside Mr. Trudeau, bright as another button, at a press conference.

Mr. Trudeau, chipper and smiling, welcomed Ms. Adams into the Liberal caucus, with all the joy of the biblical shepherd, whom we remember went all Hosanna over the one lost sheep. (“Rejoice with me, for I have found the sheep which is lost.”)

A little strange, that the leader who has banned so many of his own Liberals, after promising “open” nominations, should be welcoming a candidate who had already been banned in her own party. And with such touching eagerness.

On other fronts there is a tentativeness that veers closely to equivocation. On the military campaign against ISIS it is difficult to know whether he is coming in or going out. He has opposed the mission but declared his support for the troops. How one separates support for the troops from the mission the troops are supporting requires some deft logical surgery. I suppose it can be done, but it will not be pretty.

His stand on the ISIS effort illustrates a pattern in Mr. Trudeau’s style. He is averse to declaring himself. He prefers to leave the blackboard murky on very many issues, except, and this is telling, on those causes officially sanctioned by the higher progressivism. On those he is certainty itself. Exiling the Liberal senators from caucus he is Sherman going into Atlanta. On abortion, and banning all right-to-life candidates, he is Patton. On ISIS and related matters, all resolution fades. There, he is Hamlet.

Mr. Trudeau, noting the direction of the wind, promises his support while simultaneously noting he has deep concerns about it

It’s much the same on the anti-terror legislation. Given Mr. Trudeau’s view of Stephen Harper, I don’t think there can be much doubt where he really stands on this. But, such is the mood of the times, a majority actually favours the bill. So Mr. Trudeau, noting the direction of the wind, promises his support while simultaneously noting he has deep concerns about it. And offers the rider that — should he win — he’ll fix it later.

It has been well said of fences, though they can be sat upon, they are not chairs.

These are the cracks in the smooth ice of the Liberal leadership, indications that below the gleaming surface things are not as secure as some might wish. He appears to want to give both a Yes and a No to many questions which, if you open one of those hatches, the other is necessarily denied. Does he not know his own mind on these matters? Or does he waver because he is not sure how public opinion has settled or will settle on them? Mr. Mulcair — who is his real rival in the upcoming election — is, by contrast, offering clarity and definition. On the terror legislation it is Mr. Mulcair who is pushing the debate, even in the teeth of the polls which show the legislation — for now — is popular.

On the domestic front the fall of oil prices is the issue of the year. On that he offered one thought that many must have found at least odd, if not inexplicable. He thinks we can deal with oil as we dealt with Medicare, a “Medicare-style model” in his own words. This is gnomic to a fault. Unless we pay to send doctors to the oil sands, or introduce waiting times for construction workers, I do not see how one national social program can successfully be the model for an utterly disparate, massive industrial one. Mr. Trudeau is merely trying to paint what he knows is unpopular — a tax on oil production — with the benign associations of Canada’s number one social program. In dance this move is called a shuffle.

He does a fine vague verbal dance on many things. This is not reassuring. Is his reluctance to commit on matters of substances a failure of nerve? Or does it stem from a tactical decision that on matters where his mind, and the minds of his advisers, are firmly made up, it is best to postpone the clear declarations, and the particular policy decisions, till the whirlwind of the election campaign?

If the phrase were not so tattered from overuse, and so-long a flag over another camp, I’d almost raise the idea of a hidden agenda. Naturally, I step back from such a heresy.

OTTAWA — Justin Trudeau says Stephen Harper is pandering to fears about Muslims with his insistence that no one should be allowed to wear a veil while taking the oath of Canadian citizenship.

The Liberal leader says Harper’s stance — which the Conservative party has enthusiastically embraced to rally support, raise money and pad its voter data base — is unworthy of a prime minister in such a diverse, multicultural country.

Harper sparked the criticism after vowing last week to appeal a court ruling that allowed a Muslim woman to take the citizenship oath without removing her niqab, a religious face-covering garment that leaves only the eyes exposed.

Harper said it’s “offensive” to hide one’s identity while joining “the Canadian family.”

J.P. Moczulski for National PostZunera Ishaq, who wants to be allowed to wear her Niqab during the Canadian citizenship ceremony, poses near home home in Mississauga, Ont. .

Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander went further in a subsequent email to Conservative supporters, urging them to sign an online petition in support of Harper’s remarks; he suggested Muslim women should not be allowed to take the oath while wearing a hijab, which covers the head but not the face.

“Canada’s diversity is our great and unique strength,” Trudeau said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

“We are the one country in the world that has figured out how to be strong, not in spite of our differences but because of them. So, the prime minister of this country has a responsibility to bring people together in this country, not to divide us by pandering to some people’s fears.”

Harper’s approach “frays away the edges of our multicultural fabric … (by) stoking and pandering to fears rather than allaying them,” he added.

What’s more, “it’s unworthy of someone who is prime minister for all Canadians.”

A spokesman for the prime minister declined to comment on Trudeau’s criticism, saying there was nothing to add beyond what Harper said last week: “I believe, and I think most Canadians believe, that it is offensive that someone would hide their identity at the very moment where they are committing to join the Canadian family. This is a society that is transparent, open and where people are equal.”

Harper made his comments in Quebec, where popular support for his government’s tough-on-terrorism stance may be boosting Conservative party fortunes as it prepares for an election in eight months.

The momentum follows the government’s decision last fall to join in air strikes against Islamic extremists in Iraq, the murders of two Canadian soldiers last October by two home-grown jihadist sympathizers and the introduction this month of sweeping new anti-terrorism measures.

In adding the issue of veiled citizenship oath-takers to the mix, Trudeau said Harper is taking a page out of the pre-election play book of former Quebec premier Pauline Marois, who introduced a charter of Quebec values that would have banned public servants from wearing any obvious religious symbols. Despite the charter’s initial popularity, Marois’ Parti Quebecois was ultimately trounced in last spring’s provincial election.

“When former premier Marois tried to do what Mr. Harper is now doing, I pointed out that Quebecers are better than that and that’s exactly what happened. So, I feel the same way about Canadians everywhere. We are a better, stronger people than Mr. Harper seems to think we are,” Trudeau said.

Dear Canada: Let’s take a long, deep breathThe National Post‘s John Ivison is pleased, as are we, that the NDP seems willing to use “every weapon in its parliamentary arsenal to ensure [new anti-terror legislation] does not receive Royal Assent until its provisions [have] been aired thoroughly in public,” and he is wearily frustrated with the Liberals for yet again being “on all sides of every issue.” Oversight is shaping up as a key theme of the NDP’s opposition, Ivison notes, and quite rightly: “Canada is the only country among our close allies that lacks a dedicated parliamentary committee with substantial powers of review over matters of national security and intelligence.”

“We should hope and expect that the New Democrats will set out clearly and plainly the many ways Bill C-51’s contents are precipitously sweeping, sloppy, unnecessary and wrong-headed,” Terry Glavin writes in the Post. “If we’re lucky, Prime Minister Stephen Harper might just get over himself for once and allow Opposition amendments to jettison the law’s nastier bits.”

André Pratte, writing for La Presse, is particularly disturbed by Craig Forcese and Kent Roach’s analysis of the provisions under which a judge can authorize CSIS to break the law. Judicial oversight sounds reassuring, as he says, but as the bill currently stands there would be no disclosure of the rulings, no avenue of appeal and in general no significant oversight of what Roach and Forcese argue is a huge break from Canadian legal tradition.

While 69% of respondents to a new Angus Reid poll support more oversight of CSIS, TheGlobe and Mail‘s Campbell Clark notes that’s the only remotely bad news for Stephen Harper in said poll: A whopping 82%, overall, support the new legislation. As such, Clark thinks NDP leader Thomas Mulcair’s opposition is likely to be “politically thankless.”

We’re not so sure about that. This strikes us as a rare and significant opportunity for Mulcair to grab some headlines and airtime and contrast himself directly with the Prime Minister — something he’s had trouble doing since Trudeaumania II propelled the Liberals to second place. That he gets to do it on what we assume is a point of principle is all the better.

The Toronto Star‘s Chantal Hébert argues that at a basic strategic level, “opposing the bill is … less perilous politically for the NDP than supporting it.” Adopting some Liberal-esque middle ground position “would only give voters for whom job one next fall would be to oust the Conservatives from power even fewer reasons to stick with the NDP,” she argues, and it would also leave them vulnerable to Elizabeth May’s Greens. True, C-51 is enormously popular in Quebec, but Hébert thinks it’s “premature to assume that Mulcair — on his home ground — will not ultimately win the argument against Harper.” And as Parti Québécois’ disastrous values charter demonstrated, just because a lot of people support something does not mean they will base their vote on it.

Back to basics: Postmedia’s Andrew Coyne defends the separate treatment of “terrorism” from other forms of violence. “There is no reason to alter your behaviour” for the sake of a “random lunatic,” he says; but a terrorist seeks to alter our conduct, and that of our society, and as “we do not want our society to be run by violence and threats,” that sort of crime warrants special treatment.

Talking of Quebec, Post‘s Graeme Hamilton brings us the latest anti-Muslim hideousness from there: So far this week, Shawinigan changed a zoning law to prevent a mosque from opening and Coalition Avenir Québec leader François Legault stumped his proposed law to prohibit religions from advocating against “Quebec values.” In a very special moment, Legault actually cited the protection of values enshrined in the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms — chapter one, part three of which conspicuously establishes “freedom of religion” as a Quebec value.

Antoine Robitaille, writing in Le Devoir, argues nothing in current domestic or international affairs justifies this curtailment of freedom, or Legault’s proposal to have any new mosques investigated before being allowed to open. He “does not seem to be aware that … a grand inquisitor responsible for issuing permits for religious organizations” would return Quebec “to a time before … Roncarelli vs. Duplessis,” he says — i.e., when the Premier could persecute unpopular religious folk at a whim. Based on recent events, we’re not sure Quebec hasn’t already arrived there.

John Geddes of Maclean’s attempts to discover what a Conservative fundraising e-mail meant when it referred to “allowing people to wear the hijab while taking the oath” — the hijab not generally being thought of as something that covers one’s face, which is the whole point of the controversy. Needless to say, the office of the formerly respectable Chris Alexander, Citizenship Minister, would not give Geddes a straight answer.

Duly notedPaul Wells of Maclean’s parses Justin Trudeau’s “let the provinces do it” position on carbon pricing and comes away with myriad questions, not least about his plan for (Trudeau’s words) “targeted federal funding to help the provinces and territories achieve their goals.” To Wells this smacks of a fascinating “innovation: the first revenue-negative carbon pricing scheme.” Also, Wells notes the whole shemozzle is based on the premise that if Canada can improve its environmental reputation abroad, all our oil-extraction troubles will soon be over. He asks: Is that “even true”?

Amanda Clarke and Elizabeth Dubois, writing in the Globe, advise the Official Languages Commissioner to draft a Twitter policy for ministers of the Crown that demands bilingual Tweeting when they’re wearing their “minister hat,” but not when they’re wearing their “constituency MP hat” or their “partisan hat.” “Yes, the line between these tweets will not always be clear,” Clarke and Dubois concede, “but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to draw it.”

We’re going to go ahead and disagree with that last part.

While everyone else talks about why Sun News was doomed, Colby Cosh of Maclean’s wonders if its fate is the same one facing cable news in general. “The mainstream American cable nets have become pathetically useless for any breaking news event, short of a space shuttle exploding on the White House lawn,” he observes. And market leader Fox News, after which Sun was modelled? “In raw numbers of viewers, it is down almost 19 per cent from [its 2009 high], and the median age of its audience is an uncomfortable 68.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/02/19/full-pundit-canadas-anti-terrorism-freakout/feed/0stdFrançois Legault, shown on Tuesday, says the Parti Quebecois has no chance of forming a government as long as holding a sovereignty referendum is part of its programJohn Ivison: Mulcair looks alone among party leaders in wanting serious talk about Tory anti-terror billhttp://news.nationalpost.com/2015/02/18/john-ivison-mulcair-looks-alone-among-party-leaders-in-wanting-serious-talk-about-anti-terror-bill/
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John Diefenbaker was clear on the role of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. “The reading of history proves that freedom always dies when criticism ends,” he said. “[The Opposition] must be vigilant against oppression and unjust invasions by the Cabinet of the rights of people. It finds fault; it suggests amendments; it asks questions and elicits information; it arouses, educates and molds public opinion by voice and vote.”

Tom Mulcair knows that the job of Opposition is to oppose. The NDP leader lived up to the obligations of his office Wednesday when he said his party will not support the government’s new anti-terror legislation, which he called “sweeping, dangerous, vague and ineffective.”

He urged the Conservative government to resist the urge to “railroad” the legislation through the House of Commons and criticized the Liberal Party for supporting it, before it had even been tabled.

He said New Democrats will put forward amendments, particularly on oversight of CSIS, the spy agency, which will receive more powers under the proposed bill. It gives CSIS express authority to disrupt “threats to the security of Canada,” even when those measures contravene the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or run contrary to other Canadian laws (albeit with a judge’s special warrant).

In the House Tuesday, Mr. Mulcair suggested measures in the bill would allow the government to spy on its political foes. The wording is sufficiently vague that it could permit CSIS to investigate anyone who challenges the government’s social, economic or environmental policies, said the NDP leader. The suggestion was dismissed as conspiracy theory from the “black helicopter fleet over there” by Stephen Harper.

On Wednesday in the House, Mr. Mulcair asked the Prime Minister to provide an example of what could constitute a threat to economic stability. Mr. Harper noted that lawful advocacy, protest, dissent and artistic expression would be exempt from this provision, before launching an attack on the NDP for making “extreme” statements.

But the Prime Minister is politicizing an issue of fundamental importance to Canadian democracy – just as he did when he revealed the contents of the bill at a campaign style rally.

Justin Trudeau’s approach is similarly cavalier. He said he would support bill C51 before he’d even read it, presumably because he was advised that it would be popular with Canadians. But that abrogates his responsibility to hold the government to account. Instead he attacked the NDP at his press conference: “The NDP has not once in its history supported anti-terror measures.”

He said the bill needs more oversight measures and a review process but, if they are not included in the bill, no matter because the Liberals will simply campaign on their proposed changes and introduce them when they win government.

This is what is so frustrating about this Liberal Party, and in particular this Liberal leader. He is on all sides of every issue – he supports the anti-terror legislation but opposes its provisions; he opposes the mission in Iraq but supports a role for Canada in the fight against ISIS.

At least he has identified one of the bill’s most worrying provisions. There were problems with the oversight of Canada’s security sector, even before the bill proposed to expand CSIS’s powers.

Former Ontario premier and interim Liberal leader Bob Rae spent five years as a member of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which monitors CSIS. He said it lacks resources and respect from the government. SIRC’s board said in its most recent annual report that, while its model offers three important benefits – independence, expertise and continuity – the system was designed 30 years ago and “it seems reasonable for Canadians to ask whether the intelligence accountability framework …is still appropriate.”

As academics Craig Forcese and Kent Roach have noted, the maxim in the security sector when dealing with powerful covert state agencies is: “trust but verify.”

The NDP will press for amendments that improve that verification process. Mr. Mulcair said his preference is to follow the British and American example where “the people who are elected take on the primary role.” Canada is the only country among our close allies that lacks a dedicated parliamentary committee with substantial powers of review over matters of national security and intelligence.

This is not a government that responds well to criticism, although it is does have the odd minister who appreciates the Conservatives do not possess a monopoly on the truth.

Jason Kenney’s amended his asylum seekers smuggling bill, following pressure from the opposition. The bill originally called for asylum seekers smuggled into Canada to be detained for one year without review by the Immigration and Refugee Board. The amended version reduced that detention without review to 14 days.

More typical was last year’s cyber-bullying law, where objections from the opposition that the law made it too easy for police, spies and others to monitor the public’s online activities, were ignored and the majority of amendments defeated.

But even though the prospects of the government adopting New Democrat amendments are slim, it is appropriate that that the Opposition uses every weapon in its parliamentary arsenal to ensure this legislation does not receive Royal Assent until its provisions been aired thoroughly in public.

As Mr. Diefenbaker noted nearly 70 years ago, that is the Opposition’s job.

“It scrutinizes every action by the government, and in doing so, prevents the short cuts through democratic procedure that governments like to make.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/02/18/john-ivison-mulcair-looks-alone-among-party-leaders-in-wanting-serious-talk-about-anti-terror-bill/feed/7stdTom-MulcairJohn Ivison: Harper and Trudeau almost make you wish both would lose the 2015 electionhttp://news.nationalpost.com/2015/02/17/john-ivison-harper-and-trudeau-almost-make-you-wish-both-would-lose-the-2015-election/
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Liberals who hijack the flag and the peace,Tories who raise money by blaming Ottawa elites.General elections based on arrows and slings,These are a few of my least favourite things.

With apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein, the past couple of days have reminded me why it’s unfortunate that the Liberals and Conservatives can’t both lose the next election. Of course they could, but that would mean an NDP government, so let’s be careful what we wish for.

But this was an unedifying spectacle, as our political leaders tried to curdle the self-righteous anger of their supporters.

The sight of Jean Chrétien and Justin Trudeau celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Maple Leaf, against the backdrop of the biggest red and white flag ever made, was a reminder of why Canadians gave the Liberals the boot in the first place.

The subliminal message was that you can’t be Canadian without being Liberal; that “Canadian values” and the national identity are uniquely Liberal in their composition. The rhetoric harkened back to the Pearsonian era, when peace was made and Canada was a “force for good” in the world. Mr. Chrétien referred to a lost place in the past that never really existed. “It was a time when Canada was respected. We were showing the world what it was to build a modern society with the diversity we had.”

But “something happened” to Canada’s image, he said, namely the election of Conservative governments. So what should have been a nonpartisan celebration of the Canadian flag turned into a campaign rally, the patriotic glow replaced by an aura of Liberal arrogance.

If the Liberals were rerunning Paul Martin’s game plan from the 2004 election — that Liberal values are Canadian values so was Stephen Harper.

In a radio interview in Quebec, he said Conservative values are Quebec values. “I remain convinced that Quebecers are not leftists, contrary to the image conveyed by some media or the opposition parties,” he said in a French language interview with a Quebec City radio station.

He proceeded to fall back on a Harper reprise from elections passim:­ that journalists are all ideologically opposed to Conservative governments.

“I understand that there are many at Radio-Canada who hate these values, but I think that these values are the true values of a large percentage of Quebecers.”

Journalist Mark Bourrie has chronicled this penchant on the part of the Prime Minister in an absorbing new book, Kill the Messengers:­ Stephen Harper’s Assault on Your Right to Know, that relies on solid research rather than polemic.

It should be widely read­ and not just because it quotes George MacDonald Fraser’s fictional cad, Harry Flashman, explaining why he is qualified to be an MP:­ “I could lie and dissemble with the best of them, give short change with a hearty clap on the shoulder, slip out from under long before the blow fell, talk toady and turn tail just as fast as a Yankee fakir selling patent pills.”

Mr. Bourrie details how the Prime Minister has systemically tried to defang parliamentary watchdogs and the press, muzzling them, delegitimizing them and attacking them.

He gets away with it because, opinion polls suggest, the majority of Canadians don’t think it is important. In fact, large numbers of voters agree with him that all populists need an enemy to rail against and for the Conservatives, the media is a soft target —­ self-important windbags, with irregular hours, expense accounts, few qualifications and no performance standards.

Small wonder, the Conservatives send out letters claiming bias, such as the one the day before the Throne Speech in 2013, when Mr. Harper’s office told TV networks that cameras could cover the Prime Minister’s speech to caucus but no reporters would be allowed in. When the media boycotted the speech in protest, Fred DeLorey, the party’s director of political operations, sent out a fundraising letter, saying the cameras had ignored Mr. Harper’s speech so that they could attend an NDP meeting. “We knew they wouldn’t give us fair coverage but this is a new low for the Ottawa elite.”

As former Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, summed it up in his post-election memoir, Fire and Ashes: “You would have thought contempt of Parliament and contempt for democracy would be an issue that would rouse the patriotic ire of citizens. You would be wrong.”

Then again, given the alternatives, perhaps that is not that surprising.

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Clarification: Liberal MP Marc Garneau took issue with a column from Friday, where I said he seemed to be suggesting Kurdish peshmerga be trained in Canada. He says he was suggesting the Kurds be trained in their homeland, away from the fighting.

Here is his quote, on being asked if he supported training that would see Canadian forces accompanying allies to the front lines.­ Readers can make up their own minds: “You don’t need to be in the front line to train. You can train in Camp Gagetown, in Camp Shilo. You’re not in the front line of combat. You can train soldiers without being in the actual front line.”

OTTAWA — Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is accusing the Conservatives of cutting funding to a federal immunization program even as public skepticism about vaccinations was growing.

Trudeau’s charge comes a week after Health Minister Rona Ambrose chided Canadians who have failed to vaccinate their children, calling them irresponsible amid an outbreak of measles in a number of North American communities.

Government documents reveal the Conservatives have slashed funding to the federal immunization program by 23% since 2006.

The program educates Canadians about the importance of vaccinations.

Since 2006, government-commissioned polling suggested Canadians were growing increasingly skeptical about vaccinations, especially during the 2009 H1N1 scare during which some respondents said they heard conflicting information about the safety of the swine flu vaccine.

A 2012 audit of the immunization program also found that it was short-staffed, and questioned whether immunization education efforts were proving successful.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says the government has always educated Canadians about the importance of vaccinations against measles and other illnesses, and will continue to do so.

It makes perfect sense that the Liberals would want to backtrack on their opposition to Canada’s military mission in Iraq, but it could really do a better job of covering its tracks. Marc Garneau’s assertion that sending planes to drop bombs on ISIS was “overkill” — because other countries were already dropping bombs — leaves them looking ridiculous.

The party has been in a mess over the mission since the beginning. When Justin Trudeau announced its opposition in October, he accused the Conservatives of being motivated by a desire to play soldier.

“As the months unfold I am certain that Canadians will realize that the Prime Minister did not think about Canada’s long-term interest or even what Canada has best to offer in the fight against ISIL when he made his decision, and it was more about ego,” he said.

Unwilling to halt there, he added: “Why aren’t we talking more about the kind of humanitarian aid that Canada can and must be engaged in, rather than trying to whip out our CF-18s and show them how big they are?”

Is it considered bad form to drop more bombs on the enemy than they can conveniently deal with?

Turns out he was wrong about Canadians’ sentiments. Not only do Canadians broadly support the mission and the efforts to contain the self-declared Islamic State, but that support grows as the brutality of ISIS becomes ever more evident. With an election due in October, the Liberals don’t want to be caught on the wrong side of public opinion, so they’ve been working to shift their position. When the Conservatives introduced new anti-terrorism legislation, Liberals suggested some changes, but said they’d vote for it one way or another.

Marc Garneau, the foreign affairs critic, appeared on CBC Thursday to do some more explaining. Far from opposing the troops efforts, he said, the party has always been supportive. Its view was always been that training Kurdish peshmerga troops to do the ground fighting was “very, very important.” So if they were in favour of the mission, why did they vote against it?

“The part we had the problem with was the CF-18s” said Mr. Garneau. “And the reason for that was because there were nine other countries providing strike aircraft and it was overkill, and I think if you look at the number of sorties and dropped bombs, there was a better way to use the Canadian military resources.”

Wait… “Overkill”? How can you have overkill when you’re trying to stop a marauding enemy army? Gen. Grant used superior numbers to wear down and defeat Gen. Lee during the U.S. civil war. Gen. Montgomery was always holding up attacks while he built up an advantage in men and equipment. Is it considered bad form to drop more bombs on the enemy than they can conveniently deal with? Would the Liberals have advised Gen. Patton to leave some of his tanks behind as the allies headed for Berlin, since the Russians, French, Canadians and all those other allies were also using tanks?

You have to wonder where the Liberals get their military strategy. Did Mr. Trudeau think it up himself? “Hey Marc, it’s really not pukka bombing those poor ISISI chaps with so many planes, all at once. Let’s back off on the CF-18s and give the poor devils a chance.” Just what is the correct number of countries to bomb an enemy before it becomes overkill?

The Liberals have to work harder at this stuff. Mr. Garneau is a sensible man. He must hate having to try and make his leader’s policy positions look sensible.

On National Flag Day of Canada, the reminiscences of a former prime minister who witnessed the emotional flag debates of the 1960s helped mark the 50th anniversary of the distinctive red-and-white emblem.

Jean Chretien joined Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau on Sunday to celebrate the milestone, sharing his insight into the political climate that led to the Canadian flag’s inception.

“Fifty years ago today it was cold. But if it was cold outside — because it was very cold on Parliament Hill — our hearts were very warm with pride as a new Canadian flag was raised for the first time,” he said to hundreds of people at the University of Toronto campus in Mississauga.

“I was there … when those who had voted for the flag got up to sing ”O Canada“ and unfortunately they were booed,” he said, adding that he saw MPs pushing and shoving each other after the vote.

Still, for Chretien — then a young MP, almost three decades away from leading the country — it was “a great day” of emancipation for Canada.

Trudeau spoke about the historical significance of the flag and the difficulties former prime minister Lester B. Pearson faced in making the bold new design a reality.

Chretien said the maple-leaf pennant has come to be a symbol of Canadian values.

“It is a flag that represents hope, represents generosity, represents sharing, represents trust,” he said. “We should all be grateful to Lester B. Pearson to have the courage to move.”

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris YoungAudience members wave Canadian flag as they wait for the arrival of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and former prime minister Jean Chretien at an event to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Canadian Flag, in Mississauga Ont., on Sunday.

Chretien also slipped in a couple of jabs at the current Conservative government as he tied the flag to Canada’s international reputation. “It was a time that Canada was respected,” he said. “We were showing the world what it was to build a modern society with the diversity that we had.”

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris YoungEve Adams, a former Conservative MP who recently crossed to the Liberal Party, sits in the audience as Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and former Prime Minister Jean Chretien attend an event to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Canadian Flag, in Mississauga, Ont., on Sunday.

But “something happened” to Canada’s global image in recent years, Chretien said, pointing to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s failure to secure Canada a seat on the United Nations security council.

“I was not very happy that day,” Chretien said.

The original flag flown over the Peace Tower on Feb. 15, 1965, was never given away.

It’s part of the House of Commons heritage collection and is on public display in Parliament’s Hall of Honour until March 1.

Harper said Sunday he would present 50 Canadian flags to 50 Canadians and organizations in recognition of their contributions to the country.

“The Canadian flag is a symbol of the values of peace, democracy, freedom and justice that define and unite us as Canadians,” he said in a statement.

“It is a common rallying point for great moments in our country’s history and a testament to our ingenuity and achievements, both at home and on the international stage.”

Gov. Gen. David Johnston also marked the anniversary Sunday by unveiling a commemorative coin and stamp in Ottawa’s Confederation Park.

“The national flag of Canada is so embedded in our national life and so emblematic of our national purpose that we simply cannot imagine our country without it,” Johnston said in a statement. “It stands for the people we are, the values we cherish and the land we call home.”

Johnston also passed along some words from the Queen.

“On this, the 50th anniversary of the National Flag of Canada, I am pleased to join with all Canadians in the celebration of this unique and cherished symbol of our country and identity,” she said.

The Liberal party’s position on the war against ISIS in Iraq is beginning to look like an egregious case of mission creep.

As polls continue to suggest that three out of four Canadians support the use of force to stop the Islamic State — including a similar percentage in Quebec, where support for combat missions has historically been lower — the Liberals are shifting their stance in subtle fashion.

Marc Garneau, the Liberal foreign affairs critic, took to the airwaves Thursday with a much softer line of opposition to the mission his party voted against last October.

He said the Liberals backed sending 69 special forces soldiers to Iraq and were supportive of the idea of training and advising the Kurdish peshmerga.

“The part we had a problem with was the involvement of the CF-18s, and the reason for that was we had nine other countries providing strike aircraft. It was overkill,” he said on CBC TV’s Power and Politics. “There were better ways to use Canadian military resources.”

What is needed is to train peshmerga fighters more quickly, he said. When pressed on how this should be done without involving Canadian forces in front-line fire-fights, he suggested they could be trained in Canada at CFB Gagetown or CFB Shilo.

Quite apart from the far-fetched nature of transporting Kurdish militia to bases in New Brunswick or Manitoba, this is a dramatic evolution of Liberal policy from that espoused by leader Justin Trudeau in a recent interview. He said he has been “unequivocal” that Canada should concentrate on such measures as humanitarian aid, refugee support and medical aid.

The current mandate for the mission in Iraq runs out in early April and the Liberals, sensing they are on the wrong side of public opinion, appear to be gearing down in preparation for a screeching U-turn.

The Liberal thinking was that this fight bore all the hallmarks of a classic quagmire — where Western countries are drawn into battle by increments until too much blood and treasure had been expended to easily back out.

The mission may yet turn sour, but there are few indications it will do so before Canadians go to the polls later this year.

Regular updates from the military suggest the initial goal of the bombing campaign has been achieved without Canadian loss — ISIS’s advance on Baghdad has been halted and the Iraqi military is preparing for a ground counter-offensive.

President Barack Obama this week asked Congress to back a global war against ISIS but the proposed legislation does not authorize the use of U.S. armed forces in “enduring offensive ground combat operations.”

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin TangLiberal MP Marc Garneau has started to soft pedal the party's opposition to Iraq.

Concerns that this could be a sequel to previous wars in Iraq or Afghanistan are, for now, unfounded.

The NDP must also be concerned about the support for military action in Iraq, particularly in Quebec.

The necessary conditions for a parliamentary consensus, when the mandate comes up for renewal, appear to be in place. The question is: do the Conservatives want all-party support?

The obvious answer is no. Stephen Harper has benefited politically from a situation where the two main opposition parties back a policy that has the support of just one in four Canadians.

Would he politicize the situation still further by bringing forward a new mandate he knows neither opposition party could support?

Conservatives I spoke with acknowledge the possibility, but said it would be a risky course of action.

“The prime minister I know wouldn’t shift to politicize. He’s prudential and the risk for political differentiation is too great with an election looming and popular support so strongly with him,” said one MP.

He said the Liberals have the opportunity to correct their position and support the mission. “But that only means we were right to begin with and Trudeau was wrong.”

It would seem an uncharacteristically speculative move on the prime minister’s part to ensnare Canada further in the Iraqi conflict, unless there were pressing operational reasons to do so.

He did not craft the current mission for partisan purposes. He was merely able to exploit opportunities created by Mr. Trudeau’s rash decision to oppose the limited intervention that was proposed.

Even if the Liberals are able to course correct, the reputational damage to their leader may already have been done.

It is testimony to the consideration that we are in an election year that every event is under a magnifying glass, every motion in Ottawa put to scrutiny and analysis. The Eve Adams defection has inspired a golden seam of commentary far out of proportion to its proper significance.

In truth what Ms. Adams does, or has done, makes for a goodish yarn, and has some elements of a soap opera. Among the more endearing theories is that, contrary to Mr. Trudeau’s awkward summation that “it’s all about Eve,” it is in fact all about Dimitri Soudas, her partner.

Because Mr. Soudras was, ere he skipped across the lawn, very high in the Conservative party, indeed a part of the Prime Minister’s inner circle, it has been speculated that the Liberals’ real object in receiving Ms. Adams with such fanfare and praise was not to capture her, but Mr. Soudas. For, according to this tantalizing line of thought, it is Mr. Soudas who is the real weapon in the election to come. He knows Conservative strategy. He knows how the campaign braintrust thinks. And, most ominously, Mr. Soudas “knows where the bodies are buried.”

Related

All very wonderful, and grist for a lazy episode of some low-watt spy story, but it’s pure nonsense. Whether Mr. Harper returns to the Prime Minister’s job, or whether Mr. Mulcair or Mr. Trudeau take it from him, will not depend on Dimitri Soudas unloading the dark secrets of his tenure within the Tory ranks. Mr. Soudas may wear many faces, but he is not Kim Philby-on-the-Rideau and Ottawa is not the scene of The Third Man. It also fails to take into account that in politics most of the “bodies” in question are (forgive the thought) rather ingloriously above ground.

The Senate story, to take the most obvious example, may be revived this spring, if Mike Duffy’s trial proceeds. Should it, it will inescapably revive damaging reflections on Mr. Harper’s judgement, in that the three Senators at its centre — Brazeau, Wallin, and Duffy — were, as has been emphasized over and over, appointed by him.

The Senate scandal stirred doubts about the Prime Minister judgement — and this is the crucial point — even among his supporters. In other words, it is a real story that reaches beyond the fevers and fantasies of the hard partisans of either party and settles in the minds of the only voters who count, the ones capable of redirecting their ballot. Partisans do not decide elections. Only those capable of shifting their support from one party to another do. The power of a real story lies in this consideration. Should the Senate story once again take over the headlines and occupy the news panels, the Adams and Soudras affair will be pure wallpaper.

Ms. Adams was welcomed to the Liberals because in an election season any MP who would walk from the Conservative to the Liberals would have his actions amped up by the Liberals and exhibited as crushing evidence that the Harper machine is failing, his sway declining, his troops restless.

We like our mini-dramas, and no campaign planner — Liberal, NDP, or Conservative — will pass up an opportunity

Likewise, if the Conservatives somehow should capture one of Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals — which, given the toilsome manner of the Liberals’ “open nomination” process, is not entirely unlikely — we would see the play in reverse. No party in an election year is beyond theatrics, hype or overstatement because, alas, that is the natural order of things.

But we like our mini-dramas, and no campaign planner — Liberal, NDP, or Conservative — will pass up an opportunity, however meagre, to grab the headlines of the day. The Adams crossover is just such a playlet. If it has any true significance, it might come to the question of why Mr. Trudeau chose so vividly to give it his personal stamp, and so powerfully endorsed Ms. Adams’ political and parliamentary virtues.

Party leaders have lieutenants for a purpose, and this tale of the week was clearly meant for one of them.

Stephen Harper has had a fine old week. Which is curious, considering he’s newly short one experienced and skilled foreign minister, one Toronto suburban MP and one formerly devoted retainer, with rumours of further departures swirling. How can things be so good for this prime minister, when they’re so bad?

Answer, in a nutshell: Opposition weakness. In last Friday’s Supreme Court decision legalizing assisted suicide, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were blessed with the equivalent of a breakaway on an open net. They fired the puck high and catapulted themselves headlong into the boards with the Eve Adams floor-crossing. Mr. Harper, meantime, carefully moved his players, in a way that shores up his defence in key areas. It does not bode well for the Grits as the government-in-waiting.

Consider that, the same morning Mr. Trudeau sat smiling beside turncoat Tory MP Ms. Adams, blithely unaware of the incredulous skepticism that was about to engulf them both, Mr. Harper without fanfare shifted Rob Nicholson to Foreign, Jason Kenney to Defence, and put James Moore atop his cabinet committee on the economy. All this was calculated to strengthen the Tories’ position ahead of the coming election. And it will likely have that effect.

Parsing Mr. Nicholson’s move to Foreign is a no-brainer: It keeps the most prominent future leadership aspirants — including Mr. Kenney, Mr. Moore, Lisa Raitt, Tony Clement and Chris Alexander — away from that prize, ensuring domestic peace, while installing someone who will do as he’s told. This appointment bolsters the theory that outgoing minister John Baird, for all his strengths, was too independent for the PM’s liking — particularly at a time when Mr. Harper personally is directing foreign policy, looking ahead to the coming campaign.

The Kenney move is intriguing. He is known to have dearly wanted Finance last year, only to see it go to Joe Oliver. And, as reported by my colleague John Ivison, Mr. Kenney was equally keen on Foreign, this time. But Defence is nothing to sneeze at; particularly now, with Canadian warplanes and special forces in Iraq. Of greater consequence, though, particularly from the PMO’s point of view, may be that Mr. Kenney won’t be easily bamboozled by his new department.

Within Conservative circles there is a view that the F-35 fighter meltdown was bequeathed to the government by DND, and that it might have been avoided had the minister at the time, Peter MacKay, been less deferential to the military brass. Since then Defence has been shorn of much of its authority over procurement — but that hasn’t turned out to be any kind of fix.

More than two years after the F-35 purchase went supernova, and even as Canada’s old warplanes are coming in handy in Iraq and Eastern Europe, there is still no progress on a new fighter. Meantime, with Arctic sovereignty on the boil, the first of five or six new Canadian Arctic patrol ships is not due to float until 2018, at the earliest. The Navy last year retired two destroyers and two supply ships. Its Halifax-class frigates are undergoing a refit.

Amid these straits, the Canadian Forces need an influential minister who will pound the table for more resources, and have the PM’s ear. Mr. Kenney qualifies. His appointment further signals that Defence will loom large both in the coming budget, and the Tory election platform.

Why did Mr. Harper not move Mr. Oliver out of Finance, while he was at it? It has become painfully clear, since the collapse in the price of oil sideswiped the government’s fiscal plans, that Mr. Oliver struggles to communicate. In House of Commons exchanges he barely holds his own. But he has other attributes, namely reliability. A change in such a key position so soon would have unsettled markets and sent a message of panic. Therefore Mr. Moore is elevated to a position from which he can speak with greater authority about the government’s economic measures. The Industry Minister is easily the cabinet’s most fluid speaker on kitchen-table issues.

Beyond all that, looming in the middle distance, is this question: What surprises will the April budget hold? The Tories know they’re vulnerable on procurement, and the botched veterans’ file. Further, senior Conservatives are aware that Mr. Trudeau’s economic plan, aimed at soft conservative swing voters, is looming. And there’s the environment, where the government has long been three steps behind, and continues to be.

Given all this, and the nature of the threat Mr. Trudeau presents, it will not be surprising if the budget brings more money for veterans, procurement reform, something new on greenhouse gases (in lockstep with the government of Alberta), and a broader-than-expected middle-class tax cut. The Conservatives believe they have some fiscal room for the latter, I am told, despite plunging oil revenue.

Here’s the bottom line: The great tax-cut wars of 2015 are set to begin. Next to that, defections and departures are small potatoes. The Liberals have unaccountably gotten themselves sidetracked at a critical moment with internal maneuvering and controversy; while Mr. Harper quietly takes care of business, his gaze trained raptor-like on his core suburban voter. It’s déjà vu, perhaps, all over again.

Unfit for office?At Huffington Post, Robert Asselin argues the appointment of unilingual anglophone Rob Nicholson as Foreign Affairs Minister “dismisses the amazing strength of our linguistic duality” and “diminishes Canada’s status as a country proud of its diversity and official languages.” He predicts it will be “quite an embarrassing day for our country” when Nicholson requires a translator at the next Francophonie summit. Perhaps. But generally people have to actually notice something happening to be embarrassed by it, don’t they?

Incidentally, Paul Wells of Maclean’s did some digging and reports, on Twitter, that unilingual anglophone foreign ministers are far less rare than certain very excited commentators would have you believe. For the record, we think it would be nice if foreign affairs ministers were bilingual, but we think a talent for diplomacy is far more important. On that front, Nicholson doesn’t strike us as even nearly consequential enough in any respect to worry about how many languages he speaks.

In the Ottawa Citizen, Andrew Cohen dials up the snootiness to 11 with respect to John Baird’s record at Foreign Affairs — “the elephant at the ballet,” he sniffs (while polishing his monocle, we imagine); “a windy, swaggering moralist” with an “untutored, unnuanced and unpersuasive” worldview. Baird closed our embassy in Tehran, blustered about ISIS with nothing to back it up, “dismissed climate change,” “disparaged our diplomats,” put our magnificent embassy official residence in Rome up for sale, “remove[d] the building named after Lester B. Pearson, a Nobel Laureate, from the address on his business card,” “never mutter[ed] a discouraging word” about Israel, “condemn[ed] human rights abuses in Iran but [was] silent on the rest of the Arab world,” and “ignored the United Nations rather than influence it as a member of the Security Council.”

We don’t think much of Baird either. But for the record, we lost the Security Council seat under Lawrence Cannon. And Baird spoke at the UN six times — a rate equal to or higher than any Chrétien-Martin foreign minister save Lloyd Axworthy.

In other linguistic matters, the Star‘s Heather Mallick calmly and rationally explains why she thinks skilled tradespeople should have to know an official language in order to become permanent residents, and she does it all without attacking anyone or making any new enemies. Gold star!

It’s not all about eveAndré Pratte, writing quite scathingly for La Presse, argues that by welcoming a staunch partisan Tory like Eve Adams into the Liberal fold, Justin Trudeau has “violated the most important promise he made to Canadians: to ‘end the outdated way of doing politics.'” Tuesday’s spectacle could hardly have been any more conspicuously politics-as-usual, as Pratte says.

Sure, Justin Trudeau “can at least claim to have lured a prominent Conservative into his ranks” in Eve Adams, the Toronto Star‘s editorialists concede. But they find this whole business “unseemly,” given both parties’ obviously “crass” motives, and they worry it will only make voters more “cynical” about politics. It very well might. And you know, to the extent Adams is “prominent,” it’s not really for anything good, is it?

Indeed, Postmedia’s Michael Den Tandt sees little in Adams that can make her a “successful MP, let alone minister,” and much that can bring grief to Team Trudeau, not least her erstwhile slavish devotion to Stephen Harper, carwash meltdown, riding nomination shenanigans and “streak of loopy narcissism.” Nor does he think Dimitri Soudas would be any kind of catch, even if he did turn full turncoat: “If any great secrets remain about the Tory strategy for 2015, it’s hard to discern where they may lie,” Den Tandt writes. “The entire effort, essentially a smear of Mr. Trudeau, was presented by Mr. Soudas himself a year ago to the Conservative party’s national council, and soon wound up in the Toronto Star.”

Speaking of which: “I suppose it’s possible that Albert Einstein’s neighbours … in Princeton, N.J., thought that because they lived next to Albert Einstein, they were master physicists too,” Paul Wells of Maclean’s entertainingly tells CBC’s The Current. “Dimitri Soudas spent a decade standing next to Stephen Harper, and he thinks that makes him a master strategist? There is no evidence for that. When he was the director general of the Conservative Party of Canada, with all the awesome power that entails, he lost his PowerPoint deck that contained his entire campaign plan, and it was rolled out in luxurious fashion in the pages of the Toronto Star over a week. He’s a clown.”

Jeez. Poor Dimitri.

Duly notedIn Le Devoir, Jocelyn Caron welcomes the apparently forthcoming availability of doctor-assisted suicide, but as a fan of democracy, he deplores the manner in which it came about. “Under the same articles of the Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled one thing, and its exact opposite, over the course of 22 years,” he observes, and it justified its reversal based on international experience and social evolution — neither of which should be within the Court’s purview, in Caron’s view. Worse still, he argues, over that same time our elected representatives looked at the issue several times, and came to the opposite conclusion. It cannot be healthy, as he says, to outsource all our difficult decisions to an unelected judiciary.

The Liberal party has a decision to make: Who’s running the party, Justin Trudeau or Mike Colle’s dead body?

Mr. Colle is the provincial Liberal representative for the Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence. After learning that Mr. Trudeau had recruited MP Eve Adams from the Conservatives – perhaps the most ill-advised trade since the Senators sent Zdeno Chara to the Bruins – Mr. Colle said what everybody (except apparently Mr. Trudeau and his advisers) knew: it was a dumb thing to do.

“I mean, that a Harper Tory from Mississauga all of a sudden is going to run here in the middle of Toronto with no connections and no awareness? You know, it’s a real insult to the local Liberals in this community,” he said.

He later told the CBC: “You don’t buy into Liberal values in 24 hours… You work, you volunteer in the community, you fight for causes. That’s what makes a Liberal. You don’t buy them at a convenience store, like it seems in this case.”

As for Ms. Adams stated desire to run in Mr. Colle’s riding, that will happen “over my dead body,” he said.

Mr. Colle is a provincial representative, not a federal one, so he’s not bound by Mr. Trudeau’s whims. And he clearly doesn’t share the enthusiasm of his party leader, Premier Kathleen Wynne, who has taken to appearing with Mr. Trudeau at every opportunity. He seems instead to prefer common sense, and a street-level grasp of political sensibilities.

In that he has an advantage over Mr. Trudeau, who, after almost two years as leader, is still making the sort of hamfisted gaffes that saddle the party with people like Ms. Adams. Eglinton-Lawrence already has a candidate for the nomination, lawyer Marco Mendecino, who has signed up hundreds of new members for the party. Mr. Trudeau will now have to either muscle him aside in favour of Ms. Adams – once again violating his “open nomination” policy and upsetting many local Liberals – or explain why he went to the trouble of recruiting her in the first place, only to let her drop off the radar a few months later.

If past practice is followed, he’ll find a way to squeeze out Mr. Mendecino, much as Ms. Wynne did in Sudbury, where the Liberal candidate was summarily jettisoned in favour of an NDP defector in a recent byelection. The Liberals won the byelection, but at the expense of many bruised Liberal followers.

Mr. Trudeau has opted for this route in the past, dictating candidates despite a pledge not to do so. Toronto Central got Chrystia Freeland because Mr. Trudeau’s people made clear they wanted it that way. Trinity-Spadina riding got Adam Vaughan for the same reason. Ottawa-Orleans got Gen. Andrew Leslie over lawyer David Bertschi when Mr. Bertschi’s “green light” was rescinded to ease the way for a Leslie acclamation. Marijuana activist Jody Emery was barred from running in Vancouver, despite Mr. Trudeau’s pro-legalization stand (perhaps to avoid the colourful Ms. Emery from attracting too much attention to the issue). Barj Dhahan, a candidate for the Liberal nomination in Vancouver South, told the CBC he was pressured to withdraw by party officials so they could run a “preferred” candidate.

Dhanah said he was offered another riding, and told he’d be acclaimed as candidate, but rejected the offer because he has lived in Vancouver South for 60 years and wanted to represent a community he knows.

In most of these cases the party leadership has insisted they’re just following standard practice, while painting the losers as whiners and ingrates.

“Any time you have a competitive situation like politics is, there are winners and there are people who don’t win and their supporters can sometimes be very emotional,” Mr. Trudeau said in the case of Mr. Dhahan.

Obviously someone needs to get this message through to Mr. Colle, before he gets too emotional. He appears to remain under the impression that local riding members have a right to run local nominations free from undue interference from party headquarters, or from a leader who wants to parachute in favoured candidates. He may have gotten that impression from Mr. Trudeau himself, who insisted that was the sort of party he planned to run. Silly Mr. Colle. Surely he’s been in politics long enough to know that party leaders often make pledges they don’t intend to keep. Did he think Mr. Trudeau would be different?

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/02/11/kelly-mcparland-whos-running-the-liberals-justin-trudeau-or-mike-colles-dead-body/feed/2stdLiberal candidate Mike Colle celebrates with supporters after being re-elected as MPP for Eglinton-Lawrence in the Ontario provincial election in Toronto Thursday, October 6, 2011.Downtown